We didn’t make it to any of the after Sonar day/beach parties on Sunday. Those who know me, know I’m not much of a beach/sun person anyway. We were considering going to the M_nus one, but ended up sleeping in, having a wander around the back streets of Barcelona, then going out for food/drinks with our German friends, which was all very nice, great drinks! That turned out to be the right choice, as we heard later the M_nus party was an hour drive out of Barcelona, and got shut down by police a few hours after it started. I heard that only Troy Pierce got to play. It would have been nice to have checked out some of the beach parties, but you need a serious amount of energy to party here non stop day/night.
We did however make it to the night M_nus party at City Hall/Zen Club on Sunday night and stayed from opening to close, 12am till 5am. We got in for free with some little passes we found in a bar earlier. Rebekah Aff (apparently one of the M_nus crew?) mixed first, deep tech-house/minimal, warming things up. Magda came on around 2.30am and played to the end. A very similar dark techno/minimal sound to her mix CD, all bass and beats and bleeps and lacking much melodic data. She also mixed up lots of quite maximal dark/noisey banging stuff, think Areal, Kompakt, Bpitch Control labels sounds. I knew basically nothing she played! It was great, but not awesome, her mixing was a bit rough too, may have been because of all the messy sunglasses wearing fan boys and girls dancing all over the stage alongside her with many of the M_nus crew, party, party, party, how do they keep going? Richie was up there, giving everyone false hope he was possibly going to play too, but it seemed it was Magda´s show.
The club was a small square box with a high ceiling, probably about 600 people, the air-conditioning was freezing when we first arrived and the club was empty, but I think it either got turned off or failed not long after, and with the club rammed and pumping in a big way later it turned into a sauna, sooo hot! There was water dripping continuously out of the air-con vents!
I’ve found the crowds here really messy, rude and pushy. At this night I felt like I was being pushed, bumped, knocked, touched, and rubbed against continuously, people dance as if they have 2m of space around them even though they are rammed up against everyone, not very nice to be amongst that when your not in the same mood as everyone else. We found a nice space and rail at the back to sit and just enjoy listening, drinking our €6 soft drinks!
We had a nice chat to Mathew Jonson outside as we were leaving too, he loves Australia, and has a lot of family in Melbourne and NZ.
We paid a little extra for a late check out on Monday morning, had some food at a great place we ate a few times in La Boqueria Mercat called Bar Central, then headed to the airport for our plane to Frankfurt with Andreas, Iris, Thomas (Heckmann), and Natasha…
Words from Deutschland coming soon…